dairy nutrition

dairy nutrition

As greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture rise worldwide, a researcher in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences is leading a new international project aimed at helping to reduce such emissions from livestock production. The $1.65 million initiative involves a consortium of researchers from nine countries whose goal is to compile scientific data and develop practices that promise to address the problem.

When people think about the sources of greenhouse gas emissions, they think of oil refineries, smokestacks, and trucks spewing out thick black smoke. They don't usually think of cows.

But recently, the idea that cattle could be a source of greenhouse gas has been attracting attention. It turns out that the belches of cows, sheep, and other livestock animals contain substantial amounts of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas that has about 25 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.

Cow belches, a major source of greenhouse gases, could be decreased by an unusual feed supplement developed by a Penn State dairy scientist. An oregano-based supplement was found to not only decrease methane emissions in dairy cows by 40 percent, but also improve milk production, according to Alexander Hristov, an associate professor of dairy nutrition.

A dairy nutritionist in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences is conducting genetic research with mice to determine if cows can be influenced by diet to produce milk with a higher fat content. You read that right. "On the surface, it may seem like a strange concept, experimenting with mice to learn things about cows," said Kevin Harvatine, assistant professor of nutritional physiology. "But the lactating dairy cow is not amenable to transgenic approaches. The mouse offers the greatest opportunity for genomic manipulation, and we have successfully developed a lactating mouse model to investigate milk-fat depression in dairy cows."